Tragedy in Syria has caused President Trump to rethink his strategy. Plus Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry breaks down the news cycle coverage. Has anyone remembered President Obama's "red line in the sand?" The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| If you're like me and suffer from insomnia, you know what? | |
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| All right, let's hope this voice holds up for the day. | |
| Glad you're with us. | |
| Write down our toll-free telephone number: it's 800-941 Sean. | |
| If you want to be a part of the program, we've got so much news today, and a lot of it is pretty amazing. | |
| And the 24-48-hour notice on Syria, we've got news out of North Korea that looks good. | |
| If I had to guess, it looks like something is about to happen with Syria. | |
| And I'll explain. | |
| Also, Iran is in the mix. | |
| They're scared to death the president's going to pull out of that horrible Obama deal, and I would suspect they're right. | |
| We have a lot happening on the Mueller front. | |
| Loretta Lynch contradicting Comey on the quote Clinton matter. | |
| Now, Comey's coming out with his big book next week. | |
| We've got something planned for James Comey, considering he's ignored every single invitation we've given him. | |
| So we'll get to that. | |
| Dershowitz is out there saying that Mueller was right in the center of the FBI's White E. Bulger case, and he's right about that. | |
| And he also, I think, is rightly pointing out that Mueller is a partisan and a zealot, and there's no doubt that that's true too. | |
| And you have the Freedom Caucus. | |
| You have Mark Meadows is now saying that they would consider impeaching Rod Rosenstein. | |
| So we've got a lot happening. | |
| Oh, our friends Diamond and Silk. | |
| Did you see that on Facebook, Diamond and Silk were actually deemed to be unsafe to the community? | |
| What does that mean, unsafe to the community? | |
| That was Facebook apparently their conclusion after six months, 29 days, five hours, 40 minutes, and 43 seconds. | |
| I didn't add it up myself. | |
| That was in a Breitbar piece. | |
| So Zuckerberg is selling your private data, but they're unsafe. | |
| Yeah, and he's up there. | |
| I thought that it was actually pretty funny on Saturday Night Live. | |
| And the fact that Facebook Zuckerberg is out there taking classes on how to be more likable. | |
| Okay, really? | |
| After you're selling every bit of information, your entire business model is selling information that you pick up about people. | |
| And that's what, how do you think they make all that money? | |
| It's all private information. | |
| Privacy for us, meaning we, the people, doesn't really exist anymore. | |
| Now, I know some of you probably are tuning in as it relates to the Kimmel issue with me. | |
| I'll be honest, it all happened. | |
| I was with my daughter yesterday at a tournament. | |
| I'm looking at my phone. | |
| Up pops the news. | |
| And I'm like, okay, I'm with my daughter. | |
| And I work too much and I don't see my kids enough as it is. | |
| I'm not wasting my Sunday and dealing with this nonsense right now. | |
| And I just not. | |
| And people say, oh, And honestly, I haven't even really done a deep dive into it yet, which I will before 9 Eastern tonight when I get on Hannity on the Fox News channel. | |
| We've got 2018 election news we'll get to today. | |
| We've got immigration caravan news that we'll get to today. | |
| We've got Trump hate on a level that it just keeps getting worse every day. | |
| So we'll get to all that. | |
| But I want to start with something that nobody else in the media, I don't think, would ever talk about. | |
| Now, the president tweeted out that if President Obama had crossed his stated red line in the sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended a long time ago. | |
| And there is truth to that. | |
| You know, this is what is amazing about the left and their appeasement policies, is that unless Donald Trump is offering billions of taxpayer dollars to try and bribe dictators, if you're standing up to a dictator or standing up to evil in our time, and the Iranian regime is an evil regime. | |
| Look at how they treat women. | |
| Look at how they treat minorities. | |
| Look at how they treat gays and lesbians. | |
| Look at how they treat Christians and Jews. | |
| Look at the proxy wars that they fight. | |
| Look at their stated goal, which is the destruction of Israel, the destruction of the United States, death to America, death to Israel, burn the Israeli flag, burn the American flag. | |
| That's who they are. | |
| That's what they believe. | |
| And so this president, unless he's willing to send in cargo planes with $150 billion in cash and other currencies, anything he does or says that actually means something is viewed as the most frightening thing to those on the left. | |
| You know, it's funny. | |
| It's just like I could tell you that most people in their lives are scared to death of any conflict. | |
| I mean, wherever I went this weekend, people were asking me about, you know, this fight I'm having with Jimmy Kimmel. | |
| I'm like, okay, I don't think twice about it. | |
| It's like, whatever switch I'm supposed to have that cares what the liberal media or left-wing politicians think about me, it does not exist. | |
| I don't care. | |
| What's happening now in terms of the country and the people that need help and the people that were left behind on food stamps, in poverty, out of work, in other words, the forgotten men and women that we talk about so often on this program. | |
| That's what matters. | |
| And there might even be issues that Kimmel and I agree on. | |
| Like, I remember when he got really emotional about health care. | |
| But the problem is he made it partisan. | |
| And I could tell you that both parties suck on health care. | |
| Obamacare was a disaster. | |
| Republicans have been pushing health care savings accounts and other solutions for years. | |
| They never even brought those issues to the forefront when they finally had an opportunity to do it, which makes me more disappointed in them than even the Democrats at the end of the day. | |
| And how many times, how many years now we've been putting poor Josh Umber on the program, this doctor from Wichita, Kansas, who actually put these cooperatives together. | |
| But back to my point, he said the Syrian disaster would have ended a long time ago. | |
| Then he said animal Assad would have been history. | |
| And then he said many dead, including women and children in a mindless chemical attack in Syria. | |
| Area of atrocities in lockdown and encircled by the Syrian army, making it completely inaccessible to the outside world. | |
| President Putin, Russia, Iran are responsible for backing the animal Assad regime, a big price to pay, open area immediately for medical help, meaning he's saying to open these areas and verification, another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. | |
| It's sick. | |
| And you could see it. | |
| I mean, and for Vladimir Putin to just sit there and lie is just, you know, before the entire world, it's like, oh, okay, like we didn't know that in past elections the Russians have tried to hack us or that they didn't try to sow havoc in this past election. | |
| That's never been an issue in contention. | |
| You know, the issue in contention is nobody knows where the emails came from that were eventually leaked by WikiLeaks. | |
| I mean, we do know that Hillary had an unsafe server, and we do know that at least five, six foreign intel agencies were able to hack into that server who eventually handed it over to Julian Assange as anybody else's business. | |
| He says it's not Russia. | |
| You know, the Intel community, some members in the community say yes, others say no. | |
| Nobody knows. | |
| You know, but the bottom line is, you know, there are, I don't want America to be the world's police department. | |
| We can't be. | |
| We're never going to be able to fight wars anymore politically in this country because we don't fight a war to win a war anymore. | |
| You know, I supported the Iraq war because I thought we were in it and I thought we were going to fight it and I thought we were going to win the war. | |
| And if you go back to Vietnam or you go back to the Iraq war, if we end up putting rules of engagement that prevent our troops from even being able to fire when threatened, we don't belong in the arena of war if we're not going to fight it to win it. | |
| And war is ugly and people die and there's casualties and collateral damage that you don't want ever. | |
| But, you know, between Vietnam, how many Americans are we going to send into a war zone only to have that war become politicized and then have a bunch of politicians say, never mind, it doesn't make sense. | |
| Now, what is America's role in the world? | |
| You know, how do we thread this needle between not wanting to be involved in nation building, which I don't want to be involved in? | |
| I don't believe we're going to be able to change the minds and hearts of people in the Middle East that want to govern in a particular way that is not representative of a democratic republic that we have. | |
| I just accept that fact. | |
| I accept that, you know, Russia, for whatever reason, you know, they're not going to overthrow Vladimir Putin anytime soon that I can see. | |
| Or China, now they've elected a president for life. | |
| I don't understand that either. | |
| But most of the world doesn't live free the way we live free. | |
| And frankly, we take a lot of our freedoms for granted. | |
| You know, in World War II, there was a very strong isolationist movement in this country. | |
| And meanwhile, we knew that Hitler was on the march. | |
| We knew that Churchill was begging Roosevelt to get in the war. | |
| After Pearl Harbor, Churchill made his way across the pond and got to Washington and got to the White House and got to FDR, and he wouldn't leave until he knew the United States was in the war because they thought that they couldn't win that war without the United States. | |
| And I think there's a lot of truth to that. | |
| And we paid a very heavy price for being involved in World War II, obviously fighting in the Pacific, where my father fought, but also fighting, you know, slamming the beaches of Normandy and all those Americans that gave their lives in World War II. | |
| But we also know what was happening, and we knew that this maniacal megalomaniac, evil Hitler, was on the march and was literally destroying millions of human souls. | |
| You know, so at one point, you got to ask yourself, okay, we don't want a nation build, but then what do you do if you see somebody as evil as Hitler on the march? | |
| One of the reasons that you see this uncanny alliance emerging between the Saudis and the Egyptians, Jordanians, and the Emirates and Israel is because they see the danger of Iranian hegemony and they see all these proxy wars being fought by the Iranians. | |
| Now, that gives us a moment in history where we could thread a needle and maybe create a lasting peace of all of those countries against Iran. | |
| And if you stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, it goes a long way to creating a long-term peace. | |
| And they say, but what do you do in Syria when you see that they're using chemical weapons against innocent men, women, and children? | |
| I don't think there's much we can, there's not much thinking here for me. | |
| In other words, if God forbid you hear your neighbors screaming that something horrible is happening across the street, you know, there's a part of the human experience where you kind of have to put your own life in jeopardy and you got to do something. | |
| You'd rather not. | |
| You'd rather not have it happen. | |
| I'd rather there not be evil in the world, but there is. | |
| And where there's such evil that has no boundaries whatsoever, the only thing they understand, it's not going to be cargo planes full of cash and other currencies from the American people. | |
| It didn't work with Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's father, when Clinton tried to bribe him. | |
| It's obviously not working with the Iranian mullahs, and it's not going to work. | |
| The only thing that Syrians Assad is going to understand is that there's a massive price to pay anytime he uses these weapons of mass destruction against innocent people. | |
| So now the president said he will decide on what this response is going to be about animal Assad and atrocious Syria in the next 24 to 48 hours. | |
| Remember, during the campaign, the president said, I'm not going to tell you when I'm going to act. | |
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's underway now, if something happens. | |
| I wouldn't be surprised by whatever the president decides here. | |
| But I do think it's a line in the sand, and I think we've missed it. | |
| And I think the president's right to call the bluff on everybody involved in this. | |
| And by the way, it's interesting that North Korea is now saying, yeah, we want to talk about denuclearization of the entire Korean peninsula. | |
| Imagine that. | |
| And Trump didn't offer any billions of dollars in energy subsidies like Clinton did. | |
| Peace through strength. | |
| That's the only thing that's going to work. | |
| It's the only thing these dictators understand. | |
| Appeasing them doesn't do a thing. | |
| It just emboldens them further. | |
| So here is the foreign policy question I think everybody has to ask themselves. | |
| Do you want an America that is going to respond to an evil, maniacal dictator that we know used gas on its own people? | |
| Now, it's not the same as invading. | |
| It's not the same. | |
| Do you want some type of military response? | |
| And the second thing that I think is amazing, when you have the North Korean dictator, rocket man, little Kim Jong-un out there saying, we're willing to discuss giving up all nuclear weapons. | |
| Now, do I think there's traps that we don't know about that are being set here on every level? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| But these are definitely interesting times. | |
| I mean, if you have the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Emirates, and Israel all united against the Iranian regime and Iranian hegemony and the Iranians fighting proxy wars and fomenting terror. | |
| And you've got this new alliance that is recognizing Israel's right to exist by people that have never recognized it in the past. | |
| You're talking about a historic opportunity to change the world in ways that no American leader probably ever thought or dreamed of in the past. | |
| You know, if we're having secret direct talks now underway between the U.S. and North Korea, I don't think there's any deal except the denuclearization of North Korea. | |
| I don't see any other deal that's on the table. | |
| And I don't think America is going to pay for it either under Donald Trump. | |
| It's going to be interesting to see how that evolves. | |
| Now, the Iranian president Rohan A is actually saying, oh, the U.S. would regret it when they withdraw from the nuclear deal. | |
| We're going to withdraw from that deal. | |
| And Iran would respond in less than a week if that happened. | |
| What's Iran going to do? | |
| Iran is going to, what, take on the United States of America? | |
| They're not going to win. | |
| They'll be destroyed, utterly, completely destroyed in a pretty short period of time. | |
| You know, so the irony of all ironies could be this: is that you have a president that is so direct and so willing to confront evil, evil, recognize it, identify it, say it, and you have a media and a liberal establishment and liberal politicians all aghast, and it could lead to a peace that nobody even considered just going back into the Obama years. | |
| Something that would have been thought of as completely and utterly impossible. | |
| All right, we've got immigration on the table. | |
| We have the caravan to America. | |
| Apparently, CNN is now on the tour. | |
| Diamond and silk are apparently unsafe to the community. | |
| We got the latest in Deep State Gate. | |
| Lynch, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, we've got a lot of updates to give to you today. | |
| And Trump hate on a level we've never seen before, all coming up on this edition, Monday edition, Sean Hannity Show. | |
| All right, 25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941. | |
| Sean, you want to be a part of the program? | |
| One poll has come out that the president's plan to impose tariffs on China is almost universally opposed by the media, but another indication of how far out of touch these media experts really are. | |
| The American people support tariffs by a landslide majority. | |
| Overall, 62% of Americans now agree with the sentiment that the tariffs are worth the risk to get better trade deals. | |
| And that's the part that I don't think the media understands: this president is a constant, perpetual, never-ending negotiator. | |
| Everything is open to negotiation. | |
| Every single thing is about negotiation. | |
| I'll give you another example. | |
| Since Larry Kudlow now has joined the administration, remember the president signed that horrible omnibus bill, and then the president found that 1974 act, and they're now looking at this huge rescission package. | |
| And basically, we all know that this was not a bill that was fiscally conservative. | |
| And we all criticized it at the time, rightly so. | |
| Anyway, what? | |
| It beefed up domestic and military spending. | |
| The president desperately wanted the military spending because of the depletion of our military and our needs, and especially at the threat level that we now face today. | |
| And what happened during the Obama years, that was the most important thing. | |
| But we didn't have the money that was for the wall to be built completely, only $1.6 billion. | |
| And they didn't do a DACA fix in the deal. | |
| And anyway, so Republicans now, they got an earful from their base about adding billions to the $21 trillion national debt, and they're now demanding border wall funding. | |
| So now with the White House, they're working with Congress. | |
| They have within the next about 40 days left, or a little less than that, 39 days left, the Republican Party on the Hill has finally figured out it's a really, it's not a bad idea to trim some of the pork that they approved in this bill. | |
| And in the Senate, you only need 51 votes. | |
| And Kudlow is out there saying, because after all, the spending can lead to deficits, spending interferes with the economy. | |
| And the president believes in deregulation and tax cutting. | |
| So let's do that. | |
| I mean, that's something that's, I mean, we get these things done. | |
| There are ways to get these things done. | |
| Let me give you some of the news. | |
| This is going to be interesting. | |
| And I have a plan. | |
| I'm not going to reveal it now, but James Comey's book is out, what, the 18th? | |
| Is that next week? | |
| What's today's date? | |
| I don't even know today's date. | |
| Today is the 9th. | |
| It's like a week, maybe the following week. | |
| I heard the 18th. | |
| Maybe that's the first time. | |
| Yeah, but books only come out on Tuesday in bookstores. | |
| A lot of people forget that. | |
| Okay, so it comes out the 17th. | |
| All right. | |
| So I guess he's going to do, let's see. | |
| Oh, it's interesting that the guy that protected Hillary Clinton wrote an exoneration for Hillary before an investigation. | |
| His first interview is going to be with, oh, Clinton sycophant George Stephanopoulos. | |
| And we've invited, we've offered so much airtime to James Comey. | |
| If he wants to come in, we'll give him three hours on this radio show. | |
| 570 stations. | |
| If he wants to meet an audience, now look, the book is going to be, Ari Fleischer was right. | |
| He made some comments over the weekend. | |
| It's going to be a number one runaway bestseller. | |
| The media is going to go nuts with it. | |
| And the question is, in this book, how many lies did he tell? | |
| And did he in any way implicate himself? | |
| Because as I have been pointing out and Jay Seculo has been pointing out and Greg Jarrett's been pointing out and Victoria Tunsing and Joe DeGenova and a bunch of other people, there's massive legal jeopardy issues as it relates to James Comey. | |
| You know, not the least of which is the leaks that he made through his friend to the New York Times about confidential conversations that he had with the president of the United States. | |
| We believe that was illegal. | |
| We believe that he put the fix in as it relates to the Clinton email server investigation. | |
| And we believe he did it without any evidence and it was done politically. | |
| Now what's interesting, apparently Loretta Lynch has done an interview with Lester Holt over at NBC. | |
| Do you notice like slowly but surely, everything that we have been revealing for a year, now the media, they're not putting it all together, but they're just doing little bits and pieces, CYA stuff, to be able to say, oh, no, we covered that too, when all they've really done is pushed pretty much entirely one story for a year, which is Trump-Russia collusion. | |
| And then after that fell apart, then it's stormy, stormy, stormy, stormy, stormy. | |
| Anyway, in a full interview with Lester Holt, he grilled her about the exchange where Comey, testifying under oath, insisted that she instructed him to call the FBI Clinton investigation a matter. | |
| Anyway, Holt said, he said it made him feel, I'm paraphrasing, strange. | |
| What did you mean when you called it a matter instead of an investigation? | |
| Let's play it. | |
| James Comey was testifying before Congress. | |
| I think it was June of last year. | |
| And he noted that you had asked him to call the Clinton probe a matter, not an investigation. | |
| But he said it made him feel, I'm paraphrasing, it made him feel strange. | |
| He noted it. | |
| What did you mean when you said, let's call it a matter, not an investigation? | |
| Well, you know, I heard about that testimony. | |
| I didn't watch it at the time, but it was brought to my attention later, and people were raising it with me. | |
| And my first response was, you know, what is the issue here? | |
| You know, I remember specifically talking with him as we talked about sensitive things on a number of occasions. | |
| You know, we often would have to discuss sensitive matters, sensitive issues, terrorism and the like, you know, law enforcement policy and the like. | |
| And this was a very sensitive investigation, as everyone knew. | |
| And the issue when he and I sat down at that time, which I think was early in the fall of 2015, was whether or not we were ready as a department to confirm an investigation going on when we typically do not confirm or deny investigations into anything with rare exceptions. | |
| But so Comey says you want to call it the Clinton matter. | |
| He wants to call it the Clinton investigation. | |
| To the extent, though, that he noted it, that it bothered him. | |
| Did he go to you and question your credibility with regard to the Clinton case? | |
| Well, I can tell you that, you know, it was a meeting like any other that we had had where we talked about the issues. | |
| And we had a full and open discussion about it. | |
| He didn't raise any concerns. | |
| And concerns were not raised. | |
| And concerns were not raised. | |
| And what about the 45-minute talk on the tarmac just days before? | |
| None of this adds up. | |
| I've never heard of an investigation or an exoneration written months before you did the investigation. | |
| It doesn't pass the smell test. | |
| And the crimes committed are so egregious, you know, especially in light of everything that we're now, look at all these people being charged with lying under oath in the Mueller investigation. | |
| Okay, lying to the FBI is a crime. | |
| Okay, well, if that's a crime, then Hillary Clinton, let's see, deleting subpoenaed emails, not one, but 33,000, having top secret, secret, special access programming information, mishandling it, and then destroying it, and then acid washing, and then beating up your devices, that's obstruction. | |
| And for Comey to conclude anything other than that doesn't pass the smell test. | |
| Those are obvious crimes. | |
| And then you've got Comey. | |
| Well, he's then in bed with McCabe, and McCabe is in deep trouble, as we all know. | |
| And then we've got Paige and Strzzok, and Strzzok and Paige hate Donald Trump, and they've got an insurance policy with McCabe, and Strzzok is the one that is ultimately the guy that interviews Hillary. | |
| He's got a complete bias in the case long before, and he was writing the exoneration with Comey in May before the July interview. | |
| And then two days later, that was the infamous press conference. | |
| You know, what's funny is, you know, now that we've done a deep dive into all this, you can now see that it's so obvious what happened here. | |
| And it's going to be fun, actually, if you watch, because they're going to be stumbling all over themselves trying not to lie and trying not to get caught up. | |
| And they're not going to be able to do it. | |
| Nobody thought that Trump would win. | |
| They never thought they'd be in this position, which is why Susan Rice is saying Obama said he wants everything done right. | |
| Yeah, okay, just because you say that 11 days after a meeting, just after Donald Trump is sworn into office, doesn't make it true in any way. | |
| And it probably likely isn't true, if you want my best guess on all of this. | |
| Now, a big fight is emerging between the Justice Department and the House Intel Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. | |
| The Justice Department said they're going to release a measly 3,600 more documents. | |
| And in the case of the FISA gate application, they have now said the Department of Justice, they're not going to release that according to Politico. | |
| In other words, Reverend Representative Devin Nunes' demand for an unredacted copy of the FISA application that infiltrated the FBI's investigation of the links between Russia and Donald Trump. | |
| They're not going to give it. | |
| They released a letter that says Nunes was the head of the House Intel Committee, and the Justice Department says that they're accommodating the committee in a manner consistent with relevant legal precedents by providing members of the department and the FBI to review the FISA applications and renewals in camera. | |
| The department considers this an extraordinary accommodation based on unique facts and circumstances. | |
| We're also extending this review opportunity to members of the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence, and the department will be in contact to arrange the appropriate review sessions in the near future. | |
| You know, Dershowitz has this right. | |
| Dershowitz is not wrong. | |
| He's dead on accurate and talking about Robert Mueller being a partisan and a zealot. | |
| There's nothing that he's doing that in any way leads to any collusion issues. | |
| Who was it that was on TV this weekend? | |
| Ken Starr actually said, this is really beginning to look like an investigation into the Russian invasion of the U.S. political system and not collusion. | |
| Well, also, collusion is not a crime, just as a matter of fact. | |
| But secondly, and more importantly, well, that's the type of thing that Devin Nunes was warning Obama about in 2014. | |
| And yet in 2016, after doing nothing, Obama was laughing at the idea that Donald Trump was whining and that any outside country could ever interfere in our elections. | |
| And if you want to know where did the DNC emails come from, who knows where they came from? | |
| Okay, we know they came from WikiLeaks, but we also know that at least five separate intelligence agencies, I would assume Iran, I would assume North Korea, I would assume China, I would assume Russia, and I would assume any other list of hostile nations towards America are involved in all of this. | |
| You know, but at the end of the day, I think that Dershowitz is right. | |
| I don't think Mueller cares about who he hurts here. | |
| He's a guy that kept four innocent people in jail, as we pointed out in the Whitey Bulger case, because Whitey Bulger was being used as an FBI informant, and later on they ended up paying over $100 million judgment in that case because they put four innocent guys in jail that they knew were innocent. | |
| And he didn't lift a finger. | |
| Just like Andrew Weissman, he put four innocent Merrill executives in jail for an entire year. | |
| Fifth Circuit overturned that. | |
| Tens of thousands of jobs lost at Anderson Accounting. | |
| You know, now I saw the Attorney General appointed a new outside prosecutor to probe the Justice Department's refusal to comply with congressional demands for evidence. | |
| Anyway, Sessions and the FBI director asked the U.S. Attorney John Lausch, whom Trump picked to lead the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Illinois, if he would supervise the Justice Department's handing over of materials to Congress. | |
| And his job would be to speed up the process. | |
| All right, well, that's a good sign. | |
| And even this weekend, I turn on the TV. | |
| I mean, you know, short of the masters, the only thing you hear about is Stormy Daniels again and again and again. | |
| You love playing that, don't you? | |
| Now, I see that Mark Meadows, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, finally somebody in the House is threatening to take concrete action if the Justice Department continues this stonewalling. | |
| And I got to remind House Republicans, you've got to understand the clock is ticking here. | |
| And a lot of this is probably going to impact the November elections. | |
| So then those documents are gone forever. | |
| So the new Democratic majority, they'll work with bad actors and they'll cover this all up. | |
| And what Meadows said about Rod Rosenstein is he's fed up, he's had enough, and that he and Jim Jordan are fed up. | |
| And they're not only going to demand answers, they're going to demand action. | |
| If they don't provide the documents, how do you get rid of Rod Rosenstein? | |
| Judge Piro asked him this weekend, and he said, well, the first area is contempt of Congress. | |
| One of the things we have in our toolbox is impeachment, meaning impeachment of Rod Rosenstein, which I don't think is a bad idea. | |
| But don't worry, they're covering all of this on conspiracy TV, MSNBC. | |
| Apparently, Joy Reed was asking, well, what if Trump refuses to be arrested by federal marshals? | |
| I'm like, really? | |
| Is that a relevant question at this point? | |
| Not really. | |
| Michael Goodwin in the New York Post rightly saying it's time for Mueller to lay out his cards. | |
| What has he got? | |
| When does this thing end? | |
| There's never been such a concerted effort to take down one president like we're living through now. | |
| Not ever. | |
| How is it possible that Facebook that makes all their money off of basically selling your private personal information? | |
| They decided out there. | |
| There are no two nicer people in the entire world than you're ever going to meet than Diamond and Silk. | |
| Diamond and Silk, I've met them. | |
| I've hung out with them. | |
| They came to our Christmas party this year. | |
| We had the best time with them. | |
| I talk to them regularly. | |
| They're just wonderful people. | |
| Anyway, Facebook apparently did some six-month, 30-plus days investigation, whatever, seven months. | |
| And they decided that they determined that they're unsafe to the community. | |
| Now, has this been rectified in any way? | |
| Have they put them back up? | |
| Do we know? | |
| I haven't heard anything about that yet. | |
| Wow. | |
| I mean, Diamond and Silk, because why? | |
| They're conservatives and they support Donald Trump and they feel that they can edit them. | |
| All right, when we come back, a deep dive into Deep Stategate, Sarah Carter, Joe DeGenova, David Schoen, Geraldo's coming up, Dan Bongino's coming up, and Ed Henry's coming up straight ahead. | |
| All right, hour two, Sean Hannity show. | |
| Write down our toll-free telephone number. | |
| You want to be a part of the program. | |
| We had gotten word of this. | |
| At least I was getting some rumblings that something had happened earlier today. | |
| This is really bizarre. | |
| And I just, I want you to hold on here. | |
| And I have a funny feeling that this in the end isn't going to work out the way the liberal media will think it is. | |
| So apparently, New York Times now reporting. | |
| The headline is that the FBI has raided the office of Trump's longtime attorney, somebody I've been friends with for a long time, Michael Cohn. | |
| And he's his personal lawyer outside, obviously, his role as president, never has been in the campaign, never has been. | |
| He was a surrogate who supported him, but was never part of the campaign, was never part of the transition, was never part of the administration. | |
| Anyway, the New York Times goes on that the FBI raided the office of President Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohn, seizing records related to several topics, including payments to a pornographic film actress. | |
| This is, of course, related to Stormy Daniels. | |
| Now, here's what's interesting: federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert Mueller, according to Mr. Cohn's attorney, who called the search, quote, completely inappropriate and unnecessary. | |
| The search does not appear to be directly related in any way to Mueller's investigation, but likely resulted from information that he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York. | |
| So the announcement, the official announcement, is this, that today the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohn, and his clients, said Stephen Ryan, his attorney. | |
| I've been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is part of a referral by the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller. | |
| Now, Cohn plays a role in aspects of the special counsel's investigation as it relates. | |
| And he recently was acknowledged, he admitted, and he had told me from the get-go when I would question him in terms of doing background information. | |
| He was very clear. | |
| He's now said it publicly, so I'm not disclosing anything that I wasn't allowed to disclose, that he never told President Trump about the payment to Stormy Daniels or Stephanie Clifford, who she had an affair with Mr. Trump. | |
| Anyway, Ryan said Cohn had cooperated with authorities. | |
| He turned over thousands of documents to congressional investigators, and he said the payments to Ms. Clifford are only one of many topics investigated, according to a person briefed on the search, and their emails and tax documents and business records, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| Anyway, here to sort through all of this. | |
| This is just breaking now. | |
| Sarah Carter, investigator reporter, Fox News contributor, Doe DeGenova, former prosecutor himself, Geneva and Tunsing, and David Schoen, civil rights and criminal defense attorney. | |
| Let me start with you, Joe DeGenova. | |
| You know, from my reading of this, I just understood that if there's an FEC violation of any kind or an in-kind contribution, that's like a slap on the wrist and a fine not raiding your offices in your home. | |
| Well, if this is a Federal Election Commission violation that led to the search of Michael Cohn's office in New York today by the Southern District of New York, that would be the appropriate place for, obviously, the search to be executed. | |
| And if there are records related to payments which might be part of an FEC investigation by the Southern District, that would also be the appropriate place for it to occur. | |
| Right now, we just don't know anything other than there was a search, but it's clearly related to something involving Mr. Cone's activities on behalf of certain individuals, whoever they might be. | |
| So we just have to wait and see what is. | |
| Would this be a normal practice for such a case like that? | |
| No, I think normally what you would do is issue a subpoena for records. | |
| You would not execute a search warrant at a lawyer's office. | |
| But this is not the first time that Justice Department lawyers have used both, have forced lawyers to waive the attorney-client privilege, as they did in the Manafort case, and apparently executed a search warrant here for the president's personal lawyer. | |
| So it remains to be seen what it's about. | |
| I mean, the most likely subject would be the Federal Election Commission. | |
| Would at some point, communications between his personal lawyer and the president, is that privileged? | |
| Oh, yes, of course. | |
| Those are privileged, but you can get... | |
| But the president doesn't email anyway, to be honest. | |
| There would only be emails about the president. | |
| Yeah, there may be memorandums, however, of conversations. | |
| Those are privileged. | |
| And in order to get those, the lawyer, the prosecutor has to state that there is a legal reason that the attorney-client privilege would not apply in this case. | |
| And so we wouldn't know what that is because that would only be in the affidavit in support of the search warrant. | |
| What would you make of this, David Cohn, from a legal standpoint? | |
| Then we'll bring in Sarah Carter. | |
| I mean, on the face of it, it sounds outrageous. | |
| First of all, you know, in these kinds of things, there are special regulations that apply for the search and seizure of any documents and computer records from an attorney's office because of the privilege issue. | |
| And the U.S. Attorney's Office would be required to put a taint team, T-A-I-N-T, taint team in place right away to make sure that whoever the prosecutors in the case are not exposed to attorney-client privileged communications. | |
| But let's start from the beginning of this thing. | |
| Special counsel referral of something this far afield, clearly this far afield from the special counsel's task? | |
| Special counsel doesn't have the authority to go outside then without consulting with Mr. Rosenstein in this case to go outside then and start another unrelated prosecution on his referral. | |
| He was appointed with a specific mandate and task in this case. | |
| That's the thing I need to learn the most about, I think, and it's the most troubling on the face of it. | |
| On the face of it, doesn't it seem then like a phishing expedition? | |
| For example, if you remember, there were charges that Michael Cohn was in Russia and then he released his passport and he'd never been to Russia. | |
| Right. | |
| And once these innuendos and allegations are made public like this, it's as if the truth is forgotten, at least for a while, except that, you know, I've said this before, quite frankly, except for shows like yours and maybe only yours that continues to dig into this kind of thing and ask the questions and demands answers. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Sarah Carter, on the face of this, I'm not sure what to make of it, but the idea that perhaps this was recommended by Robert Mueller's office and that it was the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York executing the series of search warrants. | |
| And apparently, I guess this is it seems to be Stormy Daniels related. | |
| I always thought a case like that would be, in other words, if it's an in-kind donation of some kind. | |
| And I do remember Michael saying it publicly and saying it to me at the time, that in fact he never told the president about this, that it was something that he had a pretty wide discretion on his own to handle matters without bringing it to his attention. | |
| And it might seem unusual for most people, but if you're a billionaire, I guess it's not. | |
| Yeah, I guess it's not. | |
| I think one of the bigger questions here is the sense of mission creep by the special counsel, by Robert Mueller, and these tactics. | |
| Listening to both DeGenova and David Schoen talk about this, there's a real sense of concern here about how far they're willing to go, what they're willing to do, and what type of documents they're willing to collect. | |
| Remember, I mean, there's attorney client privilege documents that you would think would be protected. | |
| And now you're saying to yourself, well, maybe these aren't being protected. | |
| You know, the story, Matt Apuzo's story, focuses a lot on Stormy Daniels. | |
| I'm sure the FEC is also a part of this. | |
| But what other documents are they seizing while they're going in here? | |
| You know, tax documents, business records, all kinds of information. | |
| And you were right from the very beginning. | |
| I mean, Cohen was being accused in the dossier, the former British spy, Christopher Seale's dossier, of being in Europe until he turned over his passport and said, look, I've never been there. | |
| Let me show you what I got. | |
| And he was forthright, apparently, with them about the $130,000 payment. | |
| Who knows what they're going to find now? | |
| I mean, I'm not saying I know what they're going to discover, but he was very open when he was questioned about that. | |
| And look at what happened to Manafort. | |
| I mean, they just basically stormed in his house at 5 a.m. | |
| This appears to be another move by the special counsel to garner attention, to shift back over to them to continue this mission creep, to find whatever they need to find on the president or on anyone else associated with the president, and really for the last 15 months have held this administration hostage. | |
| The one thing I think that I agree with Sarah wholeheartedly on with Joe is the idea of mission creep. | |
| But more importantly, this opens up an area where it seems that there's no limit at all into the fishing expedition that Mueller is now engaged in. | |
| And if he has access to everything that his personal attorney has, I can only imagine where that's going to lead. | |
| Well, apparently there is no limit. | |
| And of course, this referral probably was authorized by the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. | |
| And so there we have it. | |
| The investigation has now expanded to New York, has nothing to do with the so-called Russian collusion, and now is involved with apparently FEC and other matters being handled by the Southern District of New York. | |
| It is a remarkable testament to the danger of appointing special counsels, how they will go far afield. | |
| And even though Mr. Mueller is not technically responsible for this case, he has created this case on his own by referring it to the Southern District with the approval of Mr. Rosenstein. | |
| So there you have it. | |
| By the way, this is the same Rod Rosenstein that is not turning over documents, slow-walking documents, over to oversight and congressional committees and the Intel Committee and the Judiciary Committees and all the other committees that are trying to look into it. | |
| You know, they offer, geez, a measly 3,600 documents today when 1.2 million have been requested. | |
| Rosenstein and Ray's performance in this has been absolutely outrageous, and it certainly leads one to believe that they are clearly slow walking the production of documents and I would say an embarrassing performance by the department. | |
| And to appoint this U.S. attorney from Illinois to serve as an interlocutor with the House of Representatives is a joke. | |
| You don't need an interlocutor. | |
| Adding one person isn't going to produce a single document. | |
| The House has a right to these documents. | |
| And my view is very simple. | |
| They should hold Rosenstein and Ray in contempt. | |
| Well, that's what Mark Meadows was talking about. | |
| David, you were going to add? | |
| I just want to say, you know, we've lost track of Article II of the Constitution here. | |
| It appears that the Department of Justice, without sounding like Chicken Little, is in a state of chaos here. | |
| What kind of management is going on when we have a special counsel running roughshod over everything, supposedly under the authority of Mr. Rosenstein? | |
| We have to bring in an outside U.S. attorney to oversee document production. | |
| We have to bring in an outside U.S. attorney, also Mr. Huber from Utah, for the other investigative work. | |
| I don't understand what's going on. | |
| I know everyone's worried about the PR fallout from the president taking charge of managing the Justice Department. | |
| And I'm sensitive to that, I suppose. | |
| On the other hand, that's what Article II is for. | |
| It vests in the executive the right to run these executive agencies in the country's best interests. | |
| All right, we're going to take a break more with Sarah Carter and David Schoen and Joe DeGenova. | |
| I'll tell you what, in the next half hour, we're going to try and keep our guests if you have any questions, comments for them. | |
| 800-941-Sean is our toll-free telephone number. | |
| Yeah, the personal attorney of the president, Michael Cohn, apparently the FBI raided his office, apparently related to the Stormy Daniels matter, and Robert Mueller referring it to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York. | |
| All right, as we roll along, 800-941-Sean, toll-free telephone number, we have David Schoen and Joe DeGenova and Sarah Carter with us. | |
| And the FBI raided the office of Michael Cohn, the attorney, apparently the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, doing it at the behest, in some way, or recommendation of Robert Mueller. | |
| Seems to be related to Stormy Daniels. | |
| You know, we keep talking about overreach and exceeding one's mandate in all of this. | |
| Do you suspect here, Sarah, that the special counsel's looking for cover, knowing it's beyond his mandate, and just recommending it to the Southern District? | |
| Yeah, I suspect that's the case. | |
| I mean, I'm not an attorney here, and I think that, you know, David Schoen or Joe DeGenova would be able to answer that probably more directly. | |
| But there's a lot of issues here that don't quite pass the smell test, right? | |
| I mean, we see that they're expanding this investigation. | |
| We saw that with Robert Moeller. | |
| I've talked to sources who've said, look, you know, this is a legacy issue for Moeller. | |
| He's going to want to find something. | |
| He's going to want to find something on anybody, which is why we saw, you know, the guilty plea, one count of lying, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos. | |
| We see him going after Manafort and Rick Hates, all of which, remember, the beginning of this special counsel, this was supposed to be the foundation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. | |
| But there was no evidence, no evidence of that whatsoever. | |
| In fact, it was based on faulty, faulty analysis by a former British spy, a foreigner, who put together a dossier that he himself didn't even verify. | |
| So on its face, the special counsel, the appointment of the special counsel by Rosenstein was wrong. | |
| I mean, if you're looking at the legality of it all, I'm sure they can explain even better the attorneys. | |
| But on the face of it, it was wrong. | |
| So now they're reaching out, and you've got this mission creep, and they're looking for anything and everything. | |
| And they're, you know, stretching these tentacles far and wide. | |
| Well, go back to the original mandate. | |
| What was it they were supposed to look for? | |
| They were supposed to look for collusion, and nobody so far has found any evidence of that whatsoever. | |
| Instead, the presidency for the last 15 months has been held hostage. | |
| We've got to take a break only because of the constraints of time. | |
| Joe DeGenova, David Schoen, Sarah Carter, Ed Henry will give us a quick hit from Washington when we get back. | |
| We'll also take a couple of calls for these guys when we get back. | |
| The thing I think that's most disturbing, okay, so if they're going to raid the office of Michael Cohn, but yet we knew about really very specific crimes that Hillary committed that was serious because we know five foreign intel services got a hold of top secret classified special access program information. | |
| We know about the dossier bought and paid for, and we know about the lies to a FISA judge. | |
| All these big issues, and nothing ever happens. | |
| But Stormy Daniels, we're going to get to the bottom of in about, you know, 10 seconds. | |
| We'll raid an office if we need to. | |
| Something stinks to high heaven in all of this. | |
| All right, 25 now till the top of the hour. | |
| Toll-free telephone numbers, 800-941. | |
| Sean, if you want to be a part of the program. | |
| Anyway, so the FBI Monday raiding the office of the president's longtime attorney, Michael Cohn, seizing records and federal prosecutors in New York. | |
| And actually, the announcement was today the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants, seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohn, and his clients. | |
| That's Stephen Ryan, that's the president's attorney, revealing that to the New York Times. | |
| I have been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is, in part, a referral by the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller. | |
| And then it goes on to talk about how, you know, the payment to Stormy Daniels, which would at best be an in-kind donation FEC issue of some kind, hardly kind of go-to-jail stuff. | |
| This is like a fine and see you later, and I'm sorry. | |
| We continue with Joe DeGenova, DeGenova and Tunsing, former prosecutor himself, Sarah Carter, Fox News contributor, investigative reporter, David Schoen, civil rights criminal defense attorney. | |
| First, we get a full report from Ed Henry for the Fox News Channel, our Washington Bureau Chief. | |
| How are you? | |
| Good to see you, Sean. | |
| Never ends. | |
| In terms of this, it seems to come out of the blue, and it just shows, I think, that people like myself that have been warning that Mueller's on a witch hunt, and there's no stopping him in all these indications he's throwing out there that he wants this to end is a croc. | |
| Well, Sean, I have a source familiar with the investigation telling me that that story is true, that it was not just Michael Cohen's office in New York that was raided, but his personal apartment as well. | |
| The FBI looking for records, as you mentioned. | |
| So I can confirm that, number one. | |
| Number two, I mean, as a reporter, I won't call it a witch hunt, as you know, but what I would say is that I think that what this is pointing to is something that you and others have said many, many times, going back to the beginning of the Mueller investigation, which is, look, it started out as an investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. | |
| And a lot of people were warning a year ago or longer that this was going to morph into something else. | |
| And the fact that you now have this story in which sources are telling us that it was a referral from Robert Mueller's office, the special counsel, who, again, is supposed to be investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, that now might be referring something about Stormy Daniels and the payment or other matters that we simply don't know yet all of the facts, I think is going to raise a lot of eyebrows about where this investigation is headed. | |
| Stay right there, Ed Henry. | |
| Let me bring an attorney, David Schoenma, who's still with us. | |
| David, from me, from my standpoint, if I'm on the president's defense team at this point, I'm looking at this and saying, all right, this has now become such a stretch too far, so far from an original mandate, that now this is just outright intimidation. | |
| And it seems that Mueller's intentions are to go wherever he can possibly go because he never found Trump-Russia collusion. | |
| Let's take him down any way we can. | |
| And that tells me that whatever strategy maybe the president and his team had about cooperating with Mueller should be thrown out the window, and they shouldn't cooperate at all at this point. | |
| I mean, I've agreed with that for a long time. | |
| I don't know how you can cooperate with someone when you know that the agenda is simply to find a way to get you, whether that's through an interview, false statement claim, or some other way. | |
| We're seeing now the criminalization of a purely civil matter. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It seems like maybe the mandate has become adding to the list of reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election. | |
| So now maybe the real reason we're going to find out from this search is that she lost the election because Stormy Daniels didn't speak out about Donald Trump's affair. | |
| We're looking for the Russian collusion. | |
| We're looking for all these other reasons. | |
| The country wants to get on about its business. | |
| So cooperating with Mr. Mueller won't lead down that road. | |
| Sarah Carter, I am beginning to think that everything that I believed about Mueller and that we've revealed about the team that he's put together, and this goes to the comments that Alan Dershowitz made over the weekend, which I think were dead on accurate and I think actually applicable, and especially in light of everything here, and even the Freedom Caucus member Mark Meadows saying that he might have to impeach Rod Rosenstein and all of this. | |
| But at the end of the day, we now have a prosecutor that just seems that he's on a never-ending witch hunt and will go anyplace and anywhere. | |
| You know, Matt Drudge just actually tweeted this out, and I think it's applicable here. | |
| Star investigation began as billing records, ended with semen on a dress, cigar sex, lying under oath. | |
| Mueller began as Russia collusion ended with question mark. | |
| I was thinking the same thing. | |
| I didn't even know Drudge had posted that. | |
| But yeah, it really goes well with what's happening right now. | |
| Look, let's just go back to the weekend when Representative Mark Meadows came out, and I had spoken with him on Saturday. | |
| Then he went on Fox News' Judge Janine's show, and he talked to her about, you know, this holding in contempt Rod Rosenstein. | |
| And if they don't cooperate, they're going to find some way to get him removed. | |
| I mean, they're just so angry and frustrated in Congress because they're not getting the documents that they requested. | |
| Remember, Rosenstein's deadline, the DOJ's deadline, had passed. | |
| It was Thursday. | |
| They were supposed to turn over the documents. | |
| And then it wasn't until Sunday night, Sunday night when the DOJ decided, okay, we're going to get this U.S. attorney, John Laus, we're going to put him on board from Chicago, and then he's going to go ahead and review all these documents. | |
| I mean, this is really becoming such a burden on everyone. | |
| These documents, including not just the electronic communications, which were the beginning of the FBI's investigation, but also Carter Page's FISA applications, that even the FISA court itself, the FISC court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court says we have no problem with Congress looking at these documents. | |
| And there's 1.2 million documents, which they've already obtained, which the DOJIG already has, but now we have to have another prosecutor go through this. | |
| You know, I think we were balancing it out, trying to say, okay, DOJ is trying to do the right thing here. | |
| They're bringing in other people, but now they're bringing in another U.S. attorney to do a job of documents, which they already have. | |
| I mean, there is something here that is not quite right, and that's what all these sources are saying. | |
| And I think Americans, I'm seeing, you know, my Twitter account just explode with people's comments. | |
| They're frustrated. | |
| They're angry. | |
| They want to know what's going on. | |
| They want to know what the Department of Justice is doing. | |
| They're obviously withholding information. | |
| I want to know what all those documents say now. | |
| I want to know as well, Ed Henry, on top of all of this, I mean, we have a lot of other breaking news that the president now should make a decision in less than 48 hours about what he's going to do with the gas attack on innocent men, women, and children in Syria. | |
| That could even be in the works as we speak. | |
| North Korea actually has acknowledged that they, yeah, they're willing to talk about denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. | |
| All of that happening, and this overshadows Stormy Daniels' back. | |
| Yeah, I can tell you that from talking to some of the president's senior aides inside the White House, they've been telling me for months that one of the president's biggest concerns about all these investigations, he believes he's innocent. | |
| He's not concerned about how it's going to end in terms of innocence or guilt. | |
| He's concerned about it overshadowing his ability to conduct his job as commander-in-chief, that around the world, this is weakening him. | |
| Despite that, I would say, as you noted, he's gotten North Korea to the table. | |
| The president announced today that this quote-unquote summit with Kim Jong-un is going to happen in May or June. | |
| And so despite all the talk months ago that the president's rhetoric was way off the mark, he's gotten Kim Jong-un to the table. | |
| We'll see where that goes. | |
| Syria is a very tense, difficult situation. | |
| But I certainly think based on our reporting and what we're hearing and based on experience, the fact that about a year ago when a chemical attack like this happened, the president didn't waste really any time in moving forward with U.S. airstrikes. | |
| I think the fact that the president said today is going to decide in the next 24 to 48 hours is a clear indication, as well as the fact that Defense Secretary James Mattis said that nothing's off the table and he can't rule out U.S. military action. | |
| We can't. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And the fact that he mentioned Vladimir Putin for the first time, and it was in his Twitter account, and he mentioned and called him out on that, and Iran, as well as the others, I think is a real indication that the president is going to take some type of action in Syria and necessary action. | |
| We just saw with the UN, with the United Nations and Nikki Haley speaking before the UN about the atrocities going on there. | |
| So certainly something's going to happen. | |
| What are the options David shown for the president at this particular point in time now that this mandate has just been shattered again by Mueller and his team? | |
| I mean, the president doesn't email. | |
| The only thing Michael Cohn might have are personal private notes or cases that he worked on for the president, likely even before he ever ran or became president. | |
| Obviously, if this is now what has become a Stormy Daniels issue, I've got to imagine that the President and his legal team are going to rethink the whole thing. | |
| Right. | |
| So two things. | |
| I mean, based on what you just said, which is absolutely accurate, Michael Cohen was the president's personal lawyer. | |
| Everyone out there should know that if Michael Cohen made a deal to pay money to Stormy Daniels to protect his client's reputation, maybe his client's marriage, that's a contract. | |
| That's a civil matter that they decided. | |
| The wisdom of it is beyond me. | |
| I don't know Michael Cohen from Adams HouseCat. | |
| I don't know if I would have made the deal. | |
| Well, I could tell you with my own interactions and something that I can confirm that he told me privately that he had said publicly is that he never told the president. | |
| He told me from the get-go that was the case. | |
| Does that impact anything here? | |
| Yes, it does, of course. | |
| Because it's preposterous to think that Michael Cohen thought if Stormy Daniels speaks out about that affair, that's going to turn the election. | |
| That's election collusion. | |
| He paid her money to affect the election. | |
| That's preposterous, to me at least. | |
| But it is. | |
| Well, as his personal lawyer, would it be so unusual for somebody to have the authority for a billionaire to take care of what is basically for a billionaire a nonsense suit or a nonsense issue to them? | |
| All the time, every day of the week. | |
| Back to your question about what are the president's options. | |
| I mean, again, we've said this from the start. | |
| Neil Cadiell, who wrote the regulations for the special counsel, has written an article making it clear the president under Article 2 retains the authority over the situation. | |
| Again, everyone's worried about the PR and the fallback. | |
| I understand that. | |
| But maybe the president needs to start with Rod Rosenstein and then move on. | |
| The president ultimately has the authority built into the regulations. | |
| Here's my big question. | |
| The Clinton administration drew up for the. | |
| How is it possible that we know Hillary to avoid congressional oversight? | |
| We know she put top secret special access programming, classified information on a server. | |
| We know that it was hacked by at least five foreign service intelligence agencies. | |
| We know that she deleted 33,000 emails. | |
| We know that she acid-washed her hard drive. | |
| We know that she beat up her devices. | |
| Those are all crimes. | |
| That's obstruction. | |
| That's 18 USC 793. | |
| We know that Comey and Strzok and Page and others put the fix-in in the investigation. | |
| Then we go to the dossier. | |
| We know that they wouldn't tell us, but for a year, we finally find out that Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC that she was running paid for it. | |
| Then we find out FISA court was lied to. | |
| Nothing ever moves in this direction for the most part, except for Andrew McCabe. | |
| And I'm thinking these are far bigger crimes than anything that could have been involving Stormy Daniels and a lawyer settling a case with somebody that's making an accusation, true or not true. | |
| True, and I believe people are starting to listen to you. | |
| You're the one pushing this issue, and people are starting to wake up and listen. | |
| You're seeing others. | |
| Sarah Carter is writing article after article, exposing this stuff. | |
| You're reporting it on your show. | |
| They have to start listening. | |
| These things are very, very serious. | |
| And again, I know Mr. Dershowitz, who's the agenda, made the point about special counsel. | |
| They're right. | |
| We don't get past the threshold in the Mueller thing to appoint the special counsel, at least in comparison to these other matters. | |
| Every matter you just raised raises the spectrum of requiring a special counsel far beyond this. | |
| And then we go to our investigation of Andrew Weissman, and Andrew Weissman lost tens of thousands of jobs, overturned 9-0 in the Supreme Court. | |
| Anderson Accounting is where the jobs were lost. | |
| Then four Merrill executives go to jail, but it turns out they're innocent. | |
| That was overturned by the Fifth Circuit. | |
| Then you've got Whitey Bulger in that particular case. | |
| Four innocent people go to jail because Mueller's involved in that case with the FBI informant, and they're protecting that informant. | |
| And meanwhile, four people go to jail, two die in jail, and a $100-plus million dollar settlement. | |
| And I'm looking at this team, Sarah, that was put together by Mueller, and I'm saying, these people don't have the best track record, and yet he's appointing the most aggressive, overly aggressive people that have, by the way, in all those cases, withheld exculpatory evidence. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And that's what I was going to say. | |
| I mean, the withholding of exculpatory evidence in all those cases, how, I mean, even the nickname that the New York Times gave Weissman was, you know, Mueller's Pit Bull. | |
| That's very apropos because that appears to be what's going on here. | |
| And, you know, David Schoen brought up something that's so true. | |
| There is so much insurmountable evidence, insurmountable evidence regarding Hillary Clinton, regarding the FBI, those that were involved in it, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, both still employed by the FBI, by the way. | |
| McCabe's involvement, Rabiki, FBI Berubicki involvement in all this. | |
| So you have all of these people with all of this evidence pouring out. | |
| And you wonder, well, where is this all going? | |
| Because it seems like they're searching for some kind of crime with the special counsel when there is so much evidence of possible crimes and real crimes being committed on the other side of the world. | |
| So true. | |
| And they do nothing. | |
| Nothing happens except for Andrew McCabe. | |
| But yeah, I've got to let you all go, unfortunately. | |
| Yeah, go ahead. | |
| Last word. | |
| Real quick, Ed Henry, here. | |
| I just wanted to say, did you ever hear of a story where Hillary Clinton's attorney had his or her office and apartment raided? | |
| No. | |
| That's a good point. | |
| You know? | |
| Perfect. | |
| That's a perfect point. | |
| Ed Henry, thank you. | |
| David Schoen, thank you. | |
| Sarah Carter, thank you. | |
| You know, I'm going to tell you something. | |
| The fact that, and I'll delve into this when we get back, the double standard in all of this, it should take your breath away. | |
| It is beyond the pale. | |
| And in terms of where we go from here, you raid the homes of drug dealers and organized crime and people that are involved in terror. | |
| The private lawyer and the attorney over Stormy? | |
| I guess we can call Robert Mueller Stormy Mueller with the breaking news that we've got today and that involving the president's attorney, Michael Cohen. | |
| I mean, I want to go through this, and then we're going to get to Geraldo and Dan Bongino in the course of the program here today, because I'm going to tell you what we've now found out is Mueller brought information involving Cohn and I guess Stormy Daniels. | |
| And at best, you're talking about a fine. | |
| This is not go-to-jail stuff. | |
| You know, an FEC violation of some kind or an in-kind donation. | |
| I had to fight a case once like that because I put my best friends, he was running for Congress in a seat he never was going to win, but I linked his website to my website. | |
| Wow, that's an in-kind donation. | |
| It cost me a fortune in D.C. lawyers, sewer swamp lawyers, to get out of that stupid thing. | |
| And I'm like to my friend, I'm like, I would rather have just given you the money and you go on a vacation. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| But anyway, Mueller brought the information involving Cohn to Deputy Attorney General. | |
| He's Rod Rosenstein again. | |
| And I think that Mark Meadows is right. | |
| He needs to, this guy is out of control and decided the matter should be handled over to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. | |
| It's like they have all hands on deck in what is now a runaway train. | |
| I thought this was supposed to be about collusion. | |
| How did we get to Stormy Daniels and the president's attorney's office is now being raided? | |
| How do we get to that point? | |
| Because I'm going to tell you something. | |
| You raid, a good friend of mine sent me a good note on this. | |
| You raid the homes of drug dealers. | |
| You raid the homes of organized crime figures and people that want to commit acts of terror against the United States, not the president's private lawyer who was already cooperating with everybody. | |
| And it said publicly again and again that the president didn't know about whatever deal this thing is. | |
| I'm going to tell you something. | |
| This is a game changer here. | |
| This referral from Mueller to the Southern District, the cooperation of Rosenstein, that means Sessions had to be aware of it too, in all of this. | |
| This is all deep state stuff. | |
| And here's the worst part of this runaway train. | |
| Now we're onto a porn star. | |
| That's where Russia collusion has now evolved into. | |
| And you want to talk about a double standard. | |
| Let's talk about a double standard for a minute. | |
| Okay, where's the special counsel that ever looked into Hillary Clinton, a private email server, to avoid congressional oversight, a violation of the law to mishandle classified top-secret special access program information? | |
| How did she get away with deleting subpoenaed emails, 33,000 of them? | |
| How did she get away with acid-washing the hard drives with bleach pit? | |
| How did she get away with, you know, where's the special counsel looking into the person that busted up her devices with a hammer? | |
| Where's the special counsel? | |
| Where's the rating of her office or her attorney's office? | |
| Is this, do you not see what have I been saying from the beginning? | |
| Equal justice under the law, the rule of law, the Constitution. | |
| And let me say another thing. | |
| And then you've got all of these people. | |
| Where's the investigation into Comey's exoneration written in May, and he doesn't investigate the main players till July, and that Peter Strzok interviews Hillary, and that Peter Strzok, then she's exonerated two days later. | |
| You know, where is, you know, we have five foreign intelligence service agencies, five of them, you know, that were able to hack into Hillary's computer. | |
| Well, that compromises American national security. | |
| Then we've got the whole issue with the dossier. | |
| Nobody wanted to tell us that nobody verified what was in the dossier and that Hillary bought and paid for it and that she used her money, funneled it through a law firm, Perkins Cooey, to go to Fusion GPS to hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to get Russian and Russian government lies to influence an election after she stole the primary. | |
| And then the worst part of all of it is then that uncorroborated, unverified, now seemingly false information was used to get not only an original FISA warrant, but three subsequent applications approved, one by Rod Rosenstein, the guy that ends up appointing Robert Mueller. | |
| And Robert Mueller's appointed because of their other best friend, James Comey, leaking through a professor friend of his to the New York Times confidential conversations and notes of conversations that he has with the president. | |
| It's unbelievable. | |
| This whole thing is nothing but a witch hunt. | |
| And to me now, this is a game changer. | |
| To me, this is now a runaway train that has now gone from Russia collusion to a porn star. | |
| The double standard is breathtaking. | |
| And honestly, it's probably time to just say no to Mueller and his team. | |
| Anyway, Geraldo Rivera, his brand new book, by the way, is out. | |
| A New York Times bestseller, Geraldo at Large, the Geraldo Show. | |
| And also Dan Bongino is with us. | |
| You know, Geraldo, you've always said to me that you wish that I would ignore the obvious crimes that were committed. | |
| If I deleted emails, if I was involved in any deal that included lying to a court about where evidence was coming from, I think I'd be in jail. | |
| And you and all your attorney friends combined couldn't get me out. | |
| The problem is, Sean, you're talking about fairness, you're talking about justice, where you hit the nail on the head is that this is a game changer. | |
| Because this, first of all, let me tell you where you're absolutely right. | |
| The fact that Mueller and the special counsel's office referred this to the Southern District of New York means almost certainly that it has nothing to do with Russia or Russia Gate. | |
| So I think that we are absolutely on firm ground when we say there is no evidence of Russian collusion. | |
| But it is irrelevant now because there has been this dramatic raid on the president's personal attorney, Michael Cohen's office and his residence, sometimes residents at the Regency Hotel. | |
| That means to get that search warrant, the feds had to have come to the conclusion by law that there was probable cause that a crime or crimes had been committed. | |
| Furthermore, the feds also suggest, and the New York Times is reporting and others are corroborating their reporting, that this has to do, among other things, with the Stormy Daniels $130,000 hush payment. | |
| But it goes beyond that. | |
| If that was it, then I would be reasonably confident that Michael Cohen was the target and Michael Cohen was the subject and that it did not involve the president. | |
| We take the president at his word that he knew nothing about the $130,000 payment. | |
| But the problem is they have seized so many of the president's privileged communications with his attorney that now you have to picture their wallowing in all of these documents that were never meant for anyone's eyes other than the president and his attorney. | |
| They think they have pierced the lawyer-client privilege. | |
| Now anything goes. | |
| I just have to remind everyone that, remember, they went a long way from Whitewater the real estate controversy to Monica Lewinsky's semen-stained dress and the president lying in a poll. | |
| Well, it's interesting you say that, you know, because Drudge tweeted out, star investigation began as billing records, ended with semen on address, cigar sex, and lying under oath. | |
| Mueller began as Russia collusion ended with dot, dot, dot, dambongino. | |
| Well, Sean, the problem here is there is no damn Russia collusion. | |
| That's why they can't investigate Russian collusion. | |
| The difference with Whitewater is those land deals, Sean, actually happened. | |
| Now, whether there was criminality involved, you know, liberals will debate that till kingdom come, but they actually happened. | |
| The problem with this whole case is there is no darn Russian collusion. | |
| So they have to find other stuff. | |
| But, Sean, interesting point on this. | |
| You kind of alluded to it in your opening. | |
| I tweeted this out before. | |
| We were kind of thinking alike on this. | |
| Our justice system's collapsing in front of our very eyes, okay? | |
| Think about the bifurcated system of justice here for the connected Clintons and then for Trump, right? | |
| Hillary's friend, Cheryl Mills, who was acting as a staffer, not a lawyer, and was a potential co-conspirator in the email case, was allowed to sit in on an interview so they could kind of wink and nod at each other and to take custody of the computers that were evidence of the case. | |
| She wasn't even her lawyer. | |
| She was a staffer who went to law school. | |
| It's a difference. | |
| But Trump's lawyer, no, midday raids like he's Pablo Escobar in the middle of Manhattan. | |
| I mean, it's falling apart, Sean, in front of our very eyes. | |
| It's disgusting. | |
| And liberals should join us in their outrage against this. | |
| Well, I can't wait to hear from Alan Dershowitz tonight. | |
| But, you know, Geraldo, I think this is just dead on accurate. | |
| And there's one other thing. | |
| We know Donald Trump doesn't text, and we know that Donald Trump does in email. | |
| So there will be no emails from Trump in any way. | |
| Now, Michael Kohen has said publicly, and I can tell you that, you know, as I always reach out to sources on a daily basis to get information, he had told me early on he never told Donald Trump about this payment as it relates to Stormy or Stormy Daniels. | |
| And at one point, he asked me if I wanted an interviewer. | |
| Here's the problem. | |
| problem is the president has a far-flung business empire. | |
| He has, you know, all kinds of an array of communications with Michael Cohen about all kinds of sensitive deals and bail deals and personal trips. | |
| And I am sure that in all of these records seized from, I mean, just picture your own personal attorney over your lifetime. | |
| Our lives are so much less complicated than the president's. | |
| Certainly mine is. | |
| Yet you have some enemy wallowing around unfettered in your personal stuff. | |
| They can come up with anything. | |
| What if he underdeclared his income in 1983 or he made a deal and he represented his wealth as so much and so forth when he knew it was actually, you know, there's a million different traps. | |
| Once the enemy, and you have to consider them the enemy, once the enemy is in your stuff, then there's no telling where the activity of your enemy is. | |
| So you're basically saying that this can now evolve into a witch hunt of where it ends, nobody knows. | |
| And that would mean also that maybe the president that had talked publicly about talking to Mueller, that's a bad idea. | |
| And this is what I've been warning about, Geraldo. | |
| Look at the team that Mueller appointed. | |
| Look at Mueller's record. | |
| Look at Andrew Weissman's record. | |
| Look at how many people can he appoint and how many instances where they withheld exculpatory evidence. | |
| I absolutely agree with you. | |
| I know that Professor Dershowitz believes the president will ultimately be forced to give a sworn statement to Robert Mueller. | |
| I say fight that day as if it was the end of days. | |
| I would grab the president by his leg and hold him from going into a meeting with Robert Mueller. | |
| What if Robert Mueller, for example, asks him, did you ever get oral sex from a porn star? | |
| Just make up a question. | |
| Make up any of those kinds of questions. | |
| Well, what was in your mind when you fired James Comey as if anybody, like that would be matter in any way? | |
| That worries me. | |
| Although that's much more legitimate a question, it worries me a lot less because what's in his mind is his business. | |
| I worry about what he put on paper with his attorney. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Dan, we'll give you your last word. | |
| Geraldo's going to stay with us, though. | |
| I know you have to run. | |
| Sean, this is precisely why, having been a former federal agent, we investigate crimes. | |
| We don't investigate people. | |
| When I was a Secret Service agent, right, you couldn't walk in our office in New York and say, hey, I want to investigate Donald Trump. | |
| For what? | |
| Well, hell if I know for something. | |
| We'll find something sooner or later. | |
| You have to come in with a crime. | |
| The whole predicate crime for this, the collusion thing, does not exist. | |
| This is the very definition of a judicial wish hunt. | |
| And if you don't support abolishing this investigation now, you've thrown the Constitutional Republic out the window and you've mugged kicked the butt of Lady Liberty. | |
| Well, we'll give Geraldo a chance when you're not here. | |
| I want to hear why you think it's too late at this point. | |
| We'll ask Geraldo on the other side of it. | |
| By the way, his brand new book is out in bookstores. | |
| You want to get a hold of it, The Geraldo Show. | |
| Hannity tonight, Alan Dershowitz apparently is apoplectic about this. | |
| He'll be joining us. | |
| We'll have full coverage of this. | |
| Also, my response to Jimmy Kimmel tonight, which I haven't had time to even really think about because I've been fighting this awful cold. | |
| Anyway, 800 9.1 Sean is on number. | |
| All right, the runaway train that is Robert Mueller. | |
| You can see a collision coming up. | |
| What happened to collusion? | |
| Now it's raiding the home of the personal attorney of the president and raiding the offices of the personal attorney. | |
| This is the biggest double standard. | |
| Anyway, Geraldo is with us. | |
| His book, Geraldo the Show, is in bookstores everywhere, amazon.com, Hannity.com. | |
| You actually said it's too late to get rid of Mueller or Rosenstein. | |
| Why do you believe that? | |
| I think that Mueller is headed toward a relatively benign conclusion, Sean. | |
| He will be issuing a scathing report. | |
| He'll scold the president the way Comey scolded Hillary Clinton. | |
| But once he issues that report and maybe refers it to Congress, I think that will be the end of Mueller. | |
| I think the main show will now be in the Southern District of New York, and it will use the Michael Cohen, whatever he did vis-a-vis Stormy Daniels, as the opening to get in. | |
| And now they've gotten all these records. | |
| They're going to have 100 graduates of Yale with thick glasses looking through all of these documents. | |
| They're going to find stuff. | |
| What if there's porn on there? | |
| What if there's, you know, a liaison or some other, you know, you could people talk, guys, you know, imagine, like I said, once you let the cancer in, once he's in and to get that search warrant, there had to be probable cause that a crime or. | |
| No, Rod Rosenstein said that this was not within your mandate. | |
| This is what happened. | |
| And Jeff Sessions obviously had to be informed of this as well. | |
| And so it's almost like Mueller is teaming up with now the Southern District of New York, and it's just all things Trump. | |
| And my point about the double standard and the mission creep here or investigative creep is beyond valid. | |
| This isn't about collusion. | |
| Now we're talking about a porn star. | |
| You're absolutely right. | |
| You're absolutely right. | |
| But it doesn't matter because what we care about is the well-being of the 45th president of the United States. | |
| That's my I am driven by the fact that I want this president to succeed because when the president succeeds, the country succeeds. | |
| Why don't you stay with us, Geraldo? | |
| And I'll tell you what we'll do. | |
| Geraldo's a lawyer. | |
| And on the other side of the break, we'll come back and we'll take your calls, 800-941-Sean. | |
| Geraldo's new book, by the way, the Geraldo Show, is amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores. | |
| Great book, by the way. | |
| 50 years in TV broadcasting, an unbelievable life led. | |
| We'll take your calls on the other side. | |
| Wait till you see Hannity tonight at 9. | |
| All right, 25 till the top of the hour, 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program? | |
| I know a lot of you, well, I was with my daughter yesterday at a tournament of hers, and the news broke. | |
| I guess Kimmel had sent us his tweet to me, and I'm going to respond to it on TV tonight. | |
| But, you know, we got all this other breaking news. | |
| You know, the president now giving, prior to all the stuff about Michael Cohn and his office raided by the Southern District of New York at the recommendation of Rosenstein and Mueller, which now shows that this thing, this train is so off the track, it's ridiculous. | |
| But anyway, Syria now could be bombed by the United States anytime now. | |
| And it wouldn't surprise me if it happened now. | |
| I mean, nothing would surprise me. | |
| And North Korea has agreed to talk about denuclearizing the entire Korean peninsula, which is big news. | |
| But of course, Stormy Daniels takes the way. | |
| And a double standard that I've never seen in my life in terms of application of the law and the intensity to go after one president, one man. | |
| And it's not good. | |
| None of this is good for the country. | |
| You know, basically the entire presidency of Donald Trump, he's not had a moment to breathe with the media running with over a year. | |
| There's obviously no evidence of collusion so far because we don't see any of it. | |
| And if you have it, it's time for the special counsel to put it up. | |
| And now we're headed for a constitutional crisis, perhaps. | |
| Geraldo remains with me. | |
| His new book, The Geraldo Show, is in bookstores, AmazonHannity.com. | |
| All right, you want to take a couple of calls? | |
| Geraldo, of course, also an attorney by trade. | |
| Although we wouldn't know that with 48 years of TV experience, you are, you know, you have more experience in TV than everybody combined. | |
| It's amazing. | |
| Well, more than anyone who's still at it. | |
| You know, in 2002, I interviewed Yasser Arafat. | |
| I asked him why he didn't take the Clinton 2000, 1999 deal to settle the West Bank and the Gaza and independent Palestine. | |
| He said because he didn't trust Clinton because of Monica Lewinsky. | |
| You mentioned North Korea. | |
| How can Kim now negotiate with President Trump, thinking in the back of his mind, well, does this president, is he going to be around? | |
| I think that this is an awful, awful development that has just been thrown in our laps. | |
| I wonder when Jeff Sessions knew, the Attorney General. | |
| Did the president know? | |
| Was the president informed that his attorney was about to be raided? | |
| These are really big, big questions, Sean. | |
| Well, I mean, Rosenstein had to sign off on the idea that Mueller said, oh, I got this, but it's not within his purview in this particular case and within his mandate. | |
| But yet now you've got the special counsel coordinating with the Southern District of New York, and nobody can get any traction or any freedom at all to maneuver or move. | |
| And then what really frustrates me more than anything else is now the collusion has evolved into a porn star issue and that the double standard of real crimes committed by Hillary and a real cover-up and real collusion and real lying to a FISA court and a FISA application just seems to just go on and nothing ever happens. | |
| Well, there is no doubt in my mind that Mueller has nothing on Russia Gate. | |
| This is just like the Manafort indictment, Gates and all these other players, whether it was something they did after the fact, after they were under investigation, did they lie? | |
| Manafort, did he do something with Ukraine way before he ever met Donald Trump? | |
| It has nothing to do with the central allegation that started all this, that Donald J. Trump colluded with the Russians to get elected. | |
| You know, so nothing, nothing, nothing. | |
| But that's the problem once you start one of these special counsel federal investigations, no limits, unlimited funds, unlimited personnel. | |
| Look at anything you want to. | |
| And then finally, where did they, what happened? | |
| They got a porn star who brought up a non-disclosure agreement and $130,000 payment. | |
| Nothing to do with any cosmic issue. | |
| She happened 10 years before Donald Trump even announced himself for president, and yet she's now the one who really hurt him. | |
| Let's go to Chris in South Carolina. | |
| Chris, you're on the Sean Hannity show with our friend Geraldo. | |
| Glad you called, sir. | |
| Hi, good to talk to you both. | |
| I think that Mueller has just been dying to get hold of Cohen's records and Curtain Getton himself. | |
| So he tips off New York, so New York gets them, and then he hopes that New Yorkers kick back and goes, hey, look at this. | |
| You might be interested in this, where he couldn't have got it himself. | |
| And if all else fails, maybe he removes the lawyer from President Trump's team. | |
| Why do I and I think that's a good point, Chris? | |
| I don't trust that the Southern District is not going to be snooping into every private email, whether it's relevant or not, Geraldo. | |
| I mean, how do you trust anybody with such confidential information? | |
| How do you determine relevancy by reading everything? | |
| So they'll read everything. | |
| That's what I mean, Sean. | |
| Whatever he did wrong, what if he speeded? | |
| What if he drank underage? | |
| There's a million. | |
| If he had another non-disclosure agreement, are we now going to leak that to the press? | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| Once they established that a crime or crime had probably been committed, that's what they needed to establish to a federal judge to get this search warrant, this extraordinary search warrant of a personal attorney of the president of the United States, for God's sake. | |
| Once they managed that threshold, they got in. | |
| Now they're inside. | |
| They're inside the president's safe. | |
| They're inside his lawyer's records. | |
| Now they're wallowing around. | |
| What do you got? | |
| You know, I think that this is very, very bad news for the country. | |
| As you said, this is a president in a country where the media is totally dysfunctional and rabid and wants his demise. | |
| And now they're cheering on. | |
| The Southern District is no nonsense, very professional. | |
| Remember, the president did not hire Pri Berara, the former Southern District U.S. attorney, even though they had some. | |
| What happened to the guy that was going to replace him? | |
| Did he ever get appointed? | |
| I don't think you've ever. | |
| I think you still have an acting. | |
| I'm not sure about that. | |
| I'm not sure about that. | |
| But I know that there's got to be some bitter feelings in that office about the President of the United States. | |
| Plus, now they've got everything that Donald Trump ever did. | |
| I mean, it's really something that if I were the president now, and I wonder when he was informed, and because it did not have to do with Russia, the referral to the Southern District, that means Jeff Sessions technically was not recused from this action. | |
| You know, I don't know if it was Rob Rosenstein or whether he had the courtesy to call the Attorney General his boss. | |
| I would assume that that has happened, and I actually have people telling me behind the scenes that's exactly what happened. | |
| David and Casper Wyoming, you're on the Sean Hannity show with Geraldo Rivera. | |
| Hi. | |
| Hey, Sean, I appreciate everything you do. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I'd like to just disagree with what's going on. | |
| My understanding is Sessions only recused himself from the Russia investigation, and you kind of hinted at it. | |
| And I just recused himself from matters involving Hillary. | |
| I believe it was the Russia investigation, is what he recused himself from. | |
| But my point is, Sessions has to, this is a massive overstep of power where Sessions needs to be involved with anything other than Russia because he's the Attorney General. | |
| And then Mark Meadows, I agree with him today, where he was talking about Rosenstein being impeached because he's not providing information that was subpoenaed. | |
| The original FISA application form, unredacted, needs to be sent back to Congress so that they can review how this all started. | |
| This is not an unlimited investigation. | |
| This has a parameter. | |
| It does. | |
| I mean, that's the point. | |
| I mean, what you have here is you have the special counsel going to Rosenstein. | |
| He had to be involved. | |
| It's beyond his mandate. | |
| So then he just works with the Southern District of New York. | |
| And what it means is there's no end in sight at all for any of this. | |
| And the big double standard in all of this is we go from collusion now to investigating $130,000 involving the personal attorney of the president and a porn star. | |
| I mean, and really, all of what Hillary did, there's no special counsel. | |
| There's no rating of her attorney's home. | |
| Nothing. | |
| The double standard is massive. | |
| It's sickening. | |
| It's nauseating. | |
| Anyway, Karen and Jack. | |
| I absolutely agree. | |
| It's possible. | |
| But the president needs representation now more than ever. | |
| He needs the best attorneys that exist in this land. | |
| I like Jay Sekolo. | |
| He's a fine person and a good attorney. | |
| But right now, you need attorneys that know how government works, know how federal prosecutors work very specifically. | |
| He needs to put together his own dream team, maybe including Professor Dershowitz, who's on your show tonight, but also all of those great Washington firms that have great experience in this regard. | |
| This is now a knife fight. | |
| He's going to have to go after, you know, it could be that they prove that the lawyer client privilege was improperly pierced. | |
| But that's a whole, that's a legal argument and a verdict and an appeal from the verdict and so forth and so on. | |
| You see what I'm saying, Sean, that this is now something that's going to preoccupy the 45th president of the United States for the rest of his tenure in office. | |
| And I think that he would be doing himself and the country a grave disservice if he didn't get the best possible, most experienced knife fighters to fight in a knife place. | |
| Listen to what you're saying, though. | |
| You're basically saying, and people took issue when I said we're going to have a civil war and families are going to be throwing mashed potatoes at each other. | |
| But you're basically talking about a division that likes of which I don't think the country's seen in our lifetime. | |
| People are not going to sit back quietly on this because they see the flagrant double standard. | |
| They see what's going on here. | |
| Karen in Jackson, Michigan, you're on the Sean Hannity show. | |
| Say hi to Geraldo. | |
| Hi, Rob. | |
| Well, thank you, Sean. | |
| I agree with everything you just said, especially about the Civil War thing. | |
| We're just average people here in Jackson, Michigan, and everywhere I go, all my family, the place where I work, we all talk about this, and we've never been so involved because we want our president to succeed. | |
| They are overshadowing him, doing everything in their power to destroy him. | |
| And he cannot work on the immigration and all these other things, North Korea. | |
| All this important stuff instead of this crazy, stupid porn star stuff. | |
| It's like, get out of our life. | |
| And that Roland Steedo, he needs to be impeached. | |
| Whatever it takes to do it, let's go. | |
| God Rosenstein's the worst. | |
| All right. | |
| Thank you for the call. | |
| One thing that Mark Meadows of the Freedom Caucus said this weekend, Geraldo, was that Rosenstein could be impeached, especially because they're slow walking. | |
| They keep refusing to turn over to congressional committees who have constitutional oversight the documents that they are requesting ad nauseum. | |
| They just refuse to return it over. | |
| You know, I think that wherever the president has allies, they have to use whatever power they have in this epic battle that is now looming. | |
| But I want to give you one more historic example. | |
| 1998, Clinton bombed Osama bin Laden in Africa because of the- Wasn't that the Aspirin factory? | |
| Didn't it turn out? | |
| It turned out to be an aspirin factory. | |
| He thought it was the terror manufacturing plant. | |
| But anyway, his motives in attacking bin Laden back then were said, oh, he's just trying to distract from Monica Lewinsky. | |
| He's just trying to distract from Ken Starr's investigation. | |
| Now you've got Syria, and now you got the president. | |
| Now people will be asking, whatever the president does, is this an attempt to distract from his own problem? | |
| Well, I don't think the president even has a choice, but I think you're right. | |
| I mean, I think it brings in the question, and that was the wag the dog scenario. | |
| And it certainly looked suspicious in light of the events at the time. | |
| And then it became an aspirin factory. | |
| It seemed ill-conceived on top of everything else. | |
| All right, let's go to Anna's in Boston, Massachusetts with Teraldo Rivera on the Sean Hannity show. | |
| Hi, Anna. | |
| How are you? | |
| Hi, good. | |
| I was going to bring up the same thing that Geraldo in your last caller brought up about Sessions was never accused, only from Russia, so Mueller shouldn't have been able to go to Rosenstein. | |
| He should have had to go to Sessions. | |
| But I wanted to ask you, since somebody already asked that, will Mueller be able to see anything that this New York investigator takes from this raid? | |
| And what do you think about what is it against? | |
| I would assume that that would be shared information. | |
| Yeah, don't you think, Geraldo? | |
| I think that's a great question. | |
| I do. | |
| I mean, Mueller's got all the clearances he needs. | |
| I can't imagine that he won't be reviewing everything, although the lead will be taken by the Southern District. | |
| They are a very, very formidable bunch. | |
| I mean, they're the best. | |
| They always get the highest profile federal cases. | |
| They do all the terrorist criminal cases. | |
| They are very, very high. | |
| I watch billions also, Geraldo. | |
| I see it on billions. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| You ever watched that show? | |
| Yeah, I have, and you're right. | |
| That's a pretty accurate portrayal. | |
| I think it is, actually. | |
| All right, really quick. | |
| Stephen Orlando, News Radio WDBO with Geraldo. | |
| How are you, Stephen? | |
| Pretty good. | |
| Mr. Hannity, first, let me say it's a pleasure to talk to you, and with Geraldo online, it's especially a pleasure. | |
| I grew up watching both of you. | |
| Unfortunately, it has to be under these circumstances. | |
| My question is, with the bungling of the FBI, the stonewalling of Rod Rosenstein, and the circumventing of the scope of investigation of Robert Mueller, is there any way that the American people can file a class action lawsuit against the FBI to make them release any unclassified and non-client attorney privileged documents? | |
| Well, we do have an answer to that. | |
| That's a great question. | |
| It is, because I'll just give you my quick answer, and that is that, yeah, they can, and that's what, what's his name, Mark Meadows from the Freedom Caucus was talking about this weekend. | |
| Geraldo. | |
| Well, I think that you can file it, but I think that it will not be the most effective thing you can do with your time and energy. | |
| I would, if I were you, take the political route and bombard your political representatives and tell them you expect them to stand by the President of the United States in this epic struggle that even the president gets fairness. | |
| Even the president deserves justice. | |
| You know, just make sure that anything that the prosecutors do is reviewed, is rebuked if necessary. | |
| You've got to, this is no small potatoes. | |
| This is everything on the line now. | |
| Everything, the presidency itself is on the line. | |
| We've got to. | |
| The world's changed here, and the double standard is flagrant. | |
| All right, Geraldo, listen, thank you for staying for the full hour. | |
| We appreciate it. | |
| Geraldo's new book, The Geraldo Show, goes into every single aspect of an incredible 48-year career so far, and we always appreciate you, my friend. | |
| God bless you. | |
| All right, when we come back, well, I got a big Hannity tonight. | |
| We'll have coverage you won't get anywhere else. | |
| We'll talk about this double standard. | |
| We'll talk about what is inexplicable going on here. | |
| And also, yeah, I'll respond to Jimmy Kimmel tonight and much more Alan Dershowitz tonight. | |
| All right, we'll load it up tonight. | |
| We'll give you the analysis, the double standard that is so flagrant. | |
| We've gone from collusion now to a porn star, and now we're invading the offices of the president's personal attorney. | |
| And that's Mueller in conjunction with the Southern District of New York. | |
| Yeah, and I'll respond to Jimmy Kimmel and Alan Dershowitz. | |
| Have a great night. | |
| We'll see you at nine back here tomorrow. |